I’m grateful once again for being a cancer survivor.
The past few years has put an increased focus on health. Long term, I believe this will be a fortunate outcome for many. While we all live in our own individual reality based on our experiences, bias, environment, beliefs, etc. most people seek objectivity for a given subject. Your health should certainly warrant objectivity especially the tradeoffs on risks .vs rewards.
As a high tech geek I’m a believer of the scientific method, logic and linear thinking. However, I understand we live in an asymmetric opaque world. There are many unanswered questions that science & physics have yet to prove/explain. What is consciousness? Can you be thinking about thinking about thinking (recursion)? Does mind over matter really apply? The fields of metaphysics and psychobiology try to answer these questions? Even theoretical physics has yet to unify the general theory of relativity (big stuff) with quantum mechanics (little stuff). We know there is so much we have yet to understand about the human body.
Medical advancements have been outstanding the past 100 years. The busy life of careers, kids, activities, responsibilities, etc. leaves little time to even think about anything other than what has to be done in the next few hours.
This past year Large Language Models (LLMs) hit mainstream publicity with Chat GPT. It’s the new shiny object replacing the previous shiny object IoT. Google has its very own called BARD based on their LLM PaLM-2. You provide text based input and it provides test based answers. The neural network is coded by geeks and trained on large data sets. Can the bias of engineers influence the answers from the model? Yes of course, however the more the model is data trained and is able to get n-degrees of freedom of feedback from users; the more objective the model. Still not foolproof but an interesting use case indeed.
If curious and serious about you and your loved ones health check it out. Ask blunt and complex questions about your health. Then go see your medical doctor (at least yearly) and ask her about these same question & concerns. Will you get contradictory answers from the model? A lot of fun if you are a geek engineer and understand the plumbing. Cool technology, your milage may vary on your experience.
Please take care of your health.
Until next year for those who have lost the battle I’ll keep fighting for you one year at a time…
Bob Porras 